Drake, Monica

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Drake, Monica

PERSONAL:

Married Kassten Alonso (a writer); children: Mavis. Education: University of Arizona, M.F.A.

ADDRESSES:

Home—Portland, OR. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER:

Pacific Northwest College of Art, Portland, OR, instructor. Once worked as a clown.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Arizona Commission on the Arts award; Alligator Juniper Prize in Fiction, Millay Colony fellowship; Tennessee William scholar, Sewanee Writers Workshop.

WRITINGS:

Clown Girl: A Novel, introduction by Chuck Palahniuk, Hawthorne Books & Literary Arts (Portland, OR), 2007.

Contributor of reviews and articles to the Stranger, Oregonian, and Portland Mercury, and of fiction to Beloit Fiction Review, Threepenny Review, and Insomniac Reader.

SIDELIGHTS:

Monica Drake is a writing instructor who contributed short stories to literary journals and other periodicals before penning Clown Girl: A Novel. She had the background, having once worked as a corporate clown, for which she learned to juggle and tie balloons. Her protagonist is Nita, a female clown known as Sniffles who creates religious figures from balloons. She and the other characters live in a depressed part of their city known as Baloneytown. Drake first pictured her main character as being Chaplinesque, and she developed into a clown with those qualities, a character living in the margins of society.

Sniffles has a dog named Chance that does tricks and a rubber chicken named Plucky. Two of her male clown colleagues, who do not know her real identity, want to remake her into a corporate clown or a partner-for-pay for coulrophiles, or clown fetishists. Sniffles fears the fate of falling into the trap that has claimed so many of the neighborhood clowns. She aspires to be more and reinvents herself as Juicy Caboosy, a joke-cracking clown who juggles fire. She occasionally crashes at the house of her former boyfriend, a drug dealer by whom she became pregnant. Her health is poor, she doesn's sleep, she is lonely and isolated, and she loses her child through miscarriage. Tragedy strikes when Plucky disappears. Other characters include One-Night Stan and current boyfriend Rex Galore. Nita is helping Rex with his tuition for clown college, but he is seldom around, and Nita redirects her affection to Jerrod, a policeman.

Clown Girl was reviewed by John Marshall of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. He wrote: "What keeps Nita's story from being a big-top downer is her unlimited supply of wacky schemes and wigged-out humor. When she's not imagining how she will turn Kafka's Metamorphosis into clown performance art, she is unleashing a steady stream of thumper one-liners." A Publishers Weekly contributor wrote: "Nita emerges as a fully-realized character, bearing witness to a lot of the emotionally ridiculous and just a hint of the sublime."